Game Jolt Reviews 

Game Jolt is one of those places that just feels good to be in!!! I never thought I’d find a space that really matched my love for Undertale, but here I am, and now it's home!

It’s easy to find new games and even easier to meet people who like the same things I do. I’ve made real friends there, not just random follows, and that makes a big difference especially when it comes to IG and TikTok.

I also love that you can support creators for free. Being able to show love without spending $$$ makes the community feel really kind and welcoming.

It has been great my three years here to grow on GJ and have people see my art and I'm able to see small games here that would never have been seen otherwise.
However recently so much drama has been happening and ive seen so little moderation actually taking affect. False bans have happened lot more frequently than i ever thought they would, with so little support for almost any issue. I honestly have starter to think the site may have been abandoned...
I wish to see this site to become better again instead of painfully slowly going down, we need more real interaction and shows that they care and less of just... fillers...
-Malacho

Game Jolt is awful within it's community space, it has terrible moderation, bad actors, predators, and the people behind Game Jolt are not doing anything about it, instead of listening to the feedback, they just do collabs that no one asks for, like Labubu and Opera GX and the random Indie Games that no one's ever heard of.

They mistreat their "Creators" in the Game Jolt Creator Program.
One example of this is an user called Victoree, who was harassed for protecting her friend called Mausy, because said user is trans, and was being harassed.

Another example is an user called PunchyPressure, who harassed 2 users known as ShowBiz (now known as Charlie) and Matticraft (now known as Driftogen).

The games they have there are good, yes, but they don't deserve to be here, they deserve to be somewhere better.

The moderation also ban users who have not done anything at all, and accuse them with fake motives.

If you want to find a REAL gaming platform, i highly recommend Gamebanana, Itch.IO or Steam.

This is a fantastic service. It offers unique engagement features that you don't see elsewhere, and while it has a couple of rough edges that could use some polish... they are minor usability issues and the core product offering is actually pretty cool.

I can't comment on what it was previously, but I enjoy the social features it offers now.

It competes and outperforms text- and photo-based social networks (Twitter/X, Threads, Instagram) but isn't as good as video-based networks (YouTube, TikTok) for that type of content.

The audience on average is likely quite a lot younger than any of those alternatives that I listed above.

As a creator or game developer, they offer unique tools and social features you can't find on other platforms. It feels like a great place to promote either yourself as a gaming-focused creator, or a game as a game developer.

The website isn't as great for non-gaming creators. Traction for pop culture and other topics (e.g. any popular sci-fi TV or movie series) is extremely lacking, you pretty much need to chat about gaming-adjacent topics because that's what the audience on the platform wants to see.

As long as you understand the platform, and work within that, it offers an experience that is currently unparalleled.

GameJolt is excellent for video games (as a creator or developer or player), but "your mileage may vary" (YMMV) with anything else.

I've been an active user of Game Jolt since 2020. Back then, it felt like magic. I met many of my friends, I downloaded any FNaF fangame I could find and the site actually felt like a game sharing website.
But as time went by, that would eventually change. For the worse.
Game Jolt added quests and firesides, both in 2021. The firesides were basically just Twitch streams on Game Jolt and quests were these things you could complete for coins to exchange them for sticker packs. It wasn't that bad per se, but things got worse. Over time, Game Jolt forced their aggressive monetization tactics into their site and issues became apparent. In 2022, they removed NSFW. Game Jolt did not warn any game developers who had NSFW games published to their site about it, as they quite literally took all of them down overnight without warning. I believe they also added added a new premium currency that same year called Joltbux. At the time this was added, Game Jolt had the excuse saying "All Joltbux will go towards the Trevor Project." If you don't know what the Trevor Project is, it's a suicide hotline for young people aged 13-24. They used this as an excuse to add in microtransactions to their site which I find despicable and reprehensible. Game Jolt Inc is a very scummy company for that reason. Later that same year they added the Creator program. The creator program on paper isn't a bad idea. After all, you get paid to share your work. My problem with this is that apparently, the pay for creators is so low that the creators themselves have made shitposts about how low the creator pay is. I don't have the exact details regarding the pay for a Game Jolt creator, however, it is likely very, very low. In addition, when you sign up for Game Jolt for the first time, you get nothing but Game Jolt creators in your feed. Nothing else. It's almost as if Game Jolt has bias towards the creators so much so as to show nothing but said creators when you create an account. The final issue I have with their creator program is that they let creators get away with stealing art and breaking rules. Now, I won't act like there haven't been Game Jolt creators that have been banned for valid reasons, however, I do feel like Game Jolt is wayyyy more lenient towards the creators, as I've seen one of them literally steal art from Deviantart and use it as a sticker pack. Something else that launched in 2022 was the Game Jolt app. It's basically a TikTok wannabe. But the worst part is that you cannot even download and run games on there. You can't even play the soundtrack of a game. So then why is it called "Game Jolt" when I can't even download any games or at least download music on their app?
Moving on to 2023 they removed the Fireside feature. They say that the cost of keeping up the firesides was too high, so they basically removed that feature. After this happened the site literally just died. For me it did, as many people just stopped using Game Jolt entirely. Fast forward to now, in 2025, Game Jolt has silenced its creators, added in a pay to win feature which users could purchase booster packs to artificially boost views on posts, games and profiles, and have really stepped down in moderation. People including myself have been shadowbanned off of Game Jolt for valid criticism of the moderators' downright predatory monetization tactics. People have even gotten flat out banned off of Game Jolt because they criticized the moderators for doing this shit. Y'all are grown adults, so there is no excuse as to why anyone is getting banned for this. Speaking of people getting banned, Game Jolt also does nothing against any of the controversial people that lurk in their site. I've tried reporting them but Game Jolt does nothing. In addition, they ban people who expose other people, even if they're a pedophile. Not only that but there are instances of people posting suggestive things onto Game Jolt which stay for a long period of time with no action taken. Game Jolt's site guidelines say you need to be at least 13 to use Game Jolt or have permission from a parent to use it, but that rule is barely enforced nowadays.
Game Jolt used to be one of my favorite sites to be on. It was one of those sites that singlehandedly raised me. What was once a game sharing website filled with heart and soul has now changed into a website filled with brainrot, pedophiles, weirdos, gooners and iPad kids at every corner.
Game Jolt's moderators have asked their users to write "real reviews". So there you have it, you asked for it, here's your "real review", coming from a person who has used this site for 5 years.

A once great site, reduced to a home of two bit rip offs, pirated games and a leadership team that only seems to care about trying to line their pockets. Had you asked me 6-7 years ago I'd have told you this was once of the best platform for indie games out there, now it is nothing.

i've been active and have been hosting games on gamejolt for the past 3 years, and while in concept it is a very sound way for indie game developers and other creators to share and form communities surrounding their work, in practice it is so flawed on a fundamental level that i cannot in good faith recommend it to anyone, game developer or otherwise.

a large portion of the site's shortcomings stems from its moderation. there have been multiple instances where i accidentally stumble upon something nsfw in nature and was posted as far back as six months ago with no action taken on it. keeping in mind this is a website that targets itself primarily towards a younger demographic, this noticeable lack of moderation is completely unacceptable. i have also seen many users who openly claim to be younger than the minimum age specified in the site's terms of use (13 years), and no action is taken on them neither. i understand that gamejolt is an independently-run website and therefore may be lacking the funding that the more successful social medias have, but this site's moderation team is clearly way too small to accommodate for such a large platform like gamejolt, and it shows with the things that slip through the cracks sometimes

the biggest problem with the site though has to be with the mod team themselves. now i don't mean this as a dig on them personally, im sure they're all nice people, but it is laughable how awful they are at accepting criticism of anything to do with the website. for example, i specifically remember one incident last summer where they introduced a system where developers can pay real money for their game to get prioritized more in users' algorithms, essentially a pay-to-win feature for those who are willing to pay for it. naturally, users (in my opinion, validly) objected to this feature, and when they weren't able to ignore the criticism, they posted a response that essentially attempted to shift the blame over to the users for "[making] us the villain for their own personal gain", then when that didnt work they just disabled comments on their posts for a few days. i also remember they revoked the creator status of some creators who objected to the feature as well. it was not a good situation at all and it stemmed entirely from gamejolt's own desperately misguided attempt to gain profits

even the name "game jolt" sounds a bit misleading to me, because in recent years the website has dramatically remolded itself into more of a social media platform, and i cant help but feel like the game hosting side of the platform has been severely neglected because of this. as a game developer on the platform im also like 80% sure that hardly anyone on the site actually uses it for playing/downloading games (which to be fair isn't exactly a problem with the website itself, but it's something for other game developers to keep in mind)

overall, it's a good concept and you can find some good stuff on there if you look for it, but it's boiled down by poor moderation and an ignorant mod team. until they clean up their act, youre probably better off exploring other social media sites while game developers should consider using other sites such as itch.io instead.

each day, all day and every day something incredibly stupid and gross happens whether it be cp artists, pedophiles, both, porn, homophobia or just straight racist up people.
the platform is split by the middle and one side hates the other while im over here trying to have fun while also trying to ignore most of it.
Long story short, ITS ASS.

the moderation for this platform is terrible. they can take AGES to ban pedophiles yet they ban people who expose the pedophiles. they even ban RANDOM PEOPLE for no reason.
the platform "gamejolt" WAS a website for sharing games, now it's just a Twitter wannabe. they are focusing on everything except for games.
I've been on gamejolt for 4-5 years through various accounts and it's all just either been terrible or straight up boring
also the community guidelines just make no sense.
also one of the mods dissed ai in a post but at the same time they USED ai and verified an ai art community which makes no sense.

Game Jolt supports the assassin Charlie Kirk and will ban anyone who debates people on why they shouldn't celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I can find many posts of people celebrating it, yet they ban people for exposing these people.

This is a double standard.

As a user and creator on this website for years, I can't recommend anybody try to cultivate a following. Terrible moderation team that consistently lies to not just their websites users, but their partnered creators as well. They don't care about cultivating a strong platform, they care about preventing their sinking ship from going entirely underwater.

Takes a long time to ban porn/porn accounts, prioritizes creators over others, terrible at using their money in the correct way, heavily biased towards the left, censors people criticizing the platform, and one of the amazing mods said "Can we get real reviews from real users?" Well, this is a real review from a real user. Screw off.

I’ve been on Game Jolt for years, and I do love a lot about the platform. What started as a site mainly for games has grown into a space for art, music, animation, and more, which I think is a great direction. It’s also one of the more supportive platforms for LGBTQ+ individuals and diverse creators, which is something I truly appreciate.

That said, some serious issues make the experience frustrating. Support and moderation are wildly inconsistent. Sometimes you get a quick, helpful response, and other times your emails or reports just go ignored for weeks, if they’re answered at all. For example, getting the Creator Badge already takes time, but with this kind of support, it can feel almost impossible.

The bigger problem is moderation around bad actors. There are accounts tied to things like predatory behavior, homophobia, or worse that can linger for months or even years despite being reported. This makes the community feel unsafe at times, and it’s hard to trust that moderation is being taken seriously.

Another issue is with featured content. The same games sit in the featured section for years, often due to what I assume is sponsorships, which makes it feel less about discovery and more about deals. Features like “boosts” also add a slight pay-to-win vibe. Yes, it’s still possible to grow organically, but boosts give an advantage mostly to those who can afford them.

At the end of the day, I still enjoy Game Jolt and always will. It’s been a creative hub I’ve valued for years. But until the moderation, support, and fairness issues are addressed, it’s hard to recommend it without caution.

I LOVE IT!!!!!!! My favorite part about Game Jolt is the private chat feature. It makes it easy to talk to friends. Oh and also, check your quest log!

As someone who was apart of Game Jolt's creator program, I can say that their entire platform is in shambles. As of the time of writing this, Game Jolt has recently took shameless action against creators and even their viewers who spoke their concerns about a new feature added that revolved all around the clear attempt of begging for more money. Every creator who spoke their concerns was stripped of their creator role, blocked, and shadow banned from the platform, one moderator was behind all of the shameless actions. Even after many outcries about their actions against their own creators, they ignored the situation and silenced anybody who said anything. Almost all of Game Jolt's dedicated creators moved to their competitors platform, Itch.io after the entire situation.

Game Jolt's moderation team is some of the worst I've honestly ever seen. There has been many instances of horrendous posts being left on the platform for way too long, including animal gore and cruelty, to even child p*rn. Half the time, their own creators have to say something for them to even notice.

If you are someone who is interested in becoming a creator for Game Jolt or even just make an account to post and play games, don't. This platform does not care about their creators or users half the time, you won't even be paid well. There are many other safe platforms that don't give you viruses every time to try to click on something.

Gamejolt doesn't focus on games anymore, nor its community, as they treat the site more like a social media platform, similar to Twitter. Which isn't an overall problem at all.
They ignore criticism and hide in the same silence when something doesn't work out, such as the Post/Game Boosts feature (they hid the ad in shame when people didn't agree with it), even games have to use the boost feature to be put on the featured page. Which wasn't the case in the past.
It's also a problem where creators of the site have had their creator status revoked because of criticizing the site. They just want what's best for the site, as do I.
The site doesn't have an option to delete your account; you have to email someone at GJ to get it deleted, and it's only if they listen to you because they still haven't deleted an account from a mutual after several requests. Gamejolt, please do better.

I've been hosting my games on GameJolt for about 3 years now, and I can confidently say that it's one of the least favorable platforms I've been in.

It's an indie site, I get that; but that sort of builds onto why it isn't a good platform. The ratio between the size of the moderation team and the size of the platform in general is extremely unbalanced, resulting in a lot of posts bypassing moderation; whether it'd be slurs, NSFW imagery and so on.

They NEED to hire more people to moderate the site and at least get some sort of auto-moderation system going, what they have as of now is not reliable in the long run whatsoever; alongside that I'm very confident GameJolt only relies on user reports rather than also searching up any potential inappropriate posts (like ones that contain slurs) and doing whatever action is necessary. It is very easy to find posts that include slurs as close as a few days ago.

This site is NOT safe for kids whatsoever for this very reason, and they should all stay away from the platform as far as they can until they improve their moderation. Speaking of...

It's very easy to find minors on the platform acting in a suggestive matter, so much so that I've seen concerning imagery from minors on the platform which can definitely be deemed as highly disturbing. I tried reporting it numerous times, nothing came out of it. (neither has anything been done about the post I reported even now)
Then I tried bugging the lead member of the support team about it, what did they do?

They blocked me. As well as shadowbanned my account. This leads into my argument about how ignorant the team is.

It took about a bit less than 15 emails to get me properly unshadowbanned, with them starting by ghosting me until I sent them an email on a whole new email. They responded saying that I'm not shadowbanned which I absolutely was solely by the fact that my posts weren't popping up in people's feeds. After nagging them for a while, I got unshadowbanned and they left me off the hook 2 MONTHS AFTER. Happy ending I guess >_>

Doesn't help that shortly after I was unshadowbanned, people were getting silenced for speaking up about a feature introduced to the site which was basically the ability to buy fame. (you can tell they were running out of money)

Cause of this, people start rebelling against the platform including people part of its own "Creator" program. (a program where users can get paid, basically)

How did they deal with this? Put out a shitty statement stating the silencing was caused by a "bug" in the fame feature and then wipe out a bunch of their creators off of the program. As well as call their users mean, boo flipping hoo. Y'all are Grown. Adults.
Seems like the site is against basic free speech!

All that aside, I really don't appreciate how GameJolt is trying to attempt to be a social media platform like Twitter/X rather than a game hosting site. It feels like the team neglects the game hosting-side of the website really badly, I mean for crying out loud it's called GAMEJolt. They haven't updated the game pages in literal YEARSS! There's been bugs present in them that haven't been fixed for so damn long!

I think that's all I had to say, if anyone from the team is watching this. Take this as brutal honesty, you guys need to genuinely lock in and fix up your platform before stuff hits the fan even further. I appreciate you guys hosting my games (and unshadowbanning me I guess), which is why I gave 2 stars rather than 1 but anything else is simply not enough to earn you any more of my respect.

Use itch.

I joined gamejolt about 4-5 years ago, and for me personally, its taken a nose dive in quality over the years. my biggest problem with gamejolt is all the money based decisions its made in the last couple years. gamejolt has an in site currency called "joltbux",its costs real money and lets lets you buy backgrounds on posts and gifs to put over your PFP. if that was the furthest they went with joltbux, i wouldn't have much of a problem, but in my opinion, joltbux has had a negative effect on the platform. gamejolt has these things called quests, and before joltbux they were like little events an collabs, there was one with terraria that had a whole interactive fireside, on halloween we had the trick or treat monster, and there was an april fools event every year. however, after joltbux, quests just got boring. the halloween event became a typical 30-day art contest that completely got rid of the trick or treat monster, collabs are just the same copy paste "buy ____ brands stickers with joltbux" posts, and we didn't even HAVE an april fools event this year. all of the charm and fun of events are gone, now they boil down to stereotypical things like "draw ___ with ___ hashtag" or "joltbux". gamejolt also displayed a complete lack of respect for creators who criticized them 3 months ago during the boosts situation. 3 months ago gamejolt introduced a feature called boosts, they allowed you to pay to boost your posts. they had serval problems, like they complex way you got them and the fact that if they decided they didn't wanna boost your post for whatever reason, they wouldn't and would also not give a refund. everybody hated it, and some gamejolt users with the creator badge (system that allows people with that badge to be payed by gamejolt) criticized it. when their games were removed from featured and best shortly after criticizing gamejolt, they, as well as other creators, called them out. gamejolt responded by claiming it was a technical error, painting the creators calling them out as people "quick to spread misinformation for their own benefit", and REMOVED their creator badges. if you want more info about this see @LuminanceProductions gamejolt posts about the situation.
I am here cause gamejolt recently made a post asking "real users" to make reviews (probably because their ratings currently aren't that good), so here are real thoughts from a real user who has used your site since 2020. if you asked me to give a review back in 2020, i would prob leave a 4 star review, and its honestly crazy to see how much this site has fallen. I got shadow banned for criticism against them and a (at the time) creator who was stealing art, so when i post barley anybody sees it, so I doubt they will care much about this. but if they do, than my biggest problem that you need to fix is the fact that you turned a once unique platform into just another social media company. the only use for gamejolt I have at this point is talking to friends in dms, and gamejolts not even fully reliable for that, their servers for that specifically go down semi frequently (like every couple months).
your better off using bluesky for posting and discord for DMs.
EDIT: for anyone wanting to post art on gamejolt, while they don't feed your art to any ai's, I just found out that gamejolt has a verified AI art community.

It's honestly a pretty good site to use. There's some flaws I'd say, mostly being with response times and certain decisions, but the site is absolutely a good way to grow and expand yourself as a developer! I'm not giving an exact 5/5 as there are flaws and things should be fixed, but the site certainly is a place to be if you do want to expand your place into a community. I'd mostly try to hire other moderators, or check emails more consistently? Because at times it does feel you have to send more than just a follow up for a response, so I'd personally fix that. As for decisions, everyone makes those so it happens, but this site is a huge site so it needs to understand that the decisions made will have impact and will be split with the community so it'd be smart to fix that by posting about the idea before putting it into action so you can receive criticism on if the idea is good or not. This is small stuff mostly, but still could be fixed.

Gamejolt is... Interesting.
I have been using this website for about 3 years, and in my experience, I have been completely satisfied! It is basically where I met almost all of my friends and all of my audience and I (Luckily) did not run into any issues on anything myself.
The platform is EXTREMELY welcoming, everything is super straight forward so it never makes you feel confused, and the ways you get exposure on the platform is pretty good.
However, I must say that Gamejolt is in NO WAY perfect.
The amount of times I have seen innocent people get banned for the stupidest things is uncountable, From what I've heard the mods of the website do not care that much, again, I'm basing this based off of other people.
However, since I never experienced most of these, I will not go further.
Overall to cut it short, this platform is amazing; as long as you don't engage in any sort of drama and just be careful of what you're doing, Your experience here will be amazing.
If it was for me, I would've given it 5 stars, but as it is for many not as lucky as me, I have to rate it lower.